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Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

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Hilarious real-world math disasters and near misses

If you've ever wondered why math matters, this makes the case in the most entertaining way possible. Matt Parker turns decimal-point blunders, engineering slipups, and absurd public failures into stories that are funny, surprising, and oddly comforting. It feels like hearing a brilliant, witty friend explain how the world runs on numbers, and how spectacularly weird things get when they go wrong.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.
Just Arrived

Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World

Regular price $13.90
Unit price
per
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ISBN: 9780593084694
Authors: Matt Parker
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Date of Publication: 2021-01-19
Format: Paperback
Related Collections: History, Science
Related Topics: Mathematics, Popular Science
Goodreads rating: 4.1
(rated by 22856 readers)

Description

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER AN ADAM SAVAGE BOOK CLUB PICK The book-length answer to anyone who ever put their hand up in math class and asked, 'When am I ever going to use this in the real world?' Fun, informative, and relentlessly entertaining, Humble Pi is a charming and very readable guide to some of humanity's all-time greatest miscalculations—that also gives you permission to feel a little better about some of your own mistakes." --Ryan North, author of How to Invent Everything Our whole world is built on math, from the code running a website to the equations enabling the design of skyscrapers and bridges. Most of the time this math works quietly behind the scenes ... until it doesn't. All sorts of seemingly innocuous mathematical mistakes can have significant consequences. Math is easy to ignore until a misplaced decimal point upends the stock market, a unit conversion error causes a plane to crash, or someone divides by zero and stalls a battleship in the middle of the ocean. Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near misses, and mathematical mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman Empire, and an Olympic team, Matt Parker uncovers the bizarre ways math trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world. Getting it wrong has never been more fun.
 

Hilarious real-world math disasters and near misses

If you've ever wondered why math matters, this makes the case in the most entertaining way possible. Matt Parker turns decimal-point blunders, engineering slipups, and absurd public failures into stories that are funny, surprising, and oddly comforting. It feels like hearing a brilliant, witty friend explain how the world runs on numbers, and how spectacularly weird things get when they go wrong.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.